Thursday, November 11, 2010

Dahlia

The ungainly chop of the “informal continuum.” Olson says: “Flow . . . is not continuous ‘length,’ it is leaped atomism—quanta, jumping like nerves in fatigue— . . . rightly sought & used as a habit.”* One with all the amass’d and itch-trigger’d quality of a “physical memory.” Wave / particle: the atomism of flow. The way, scouting through Merrill Gilfillan’s The Bark of the Dog (Flood Editions, 2010), I hit “Damsels”—“demoiselles resting / in an utter stillness / on every other cranny / or twig, every tree / copper-carmine, blanched lapis / tails hiked in the cool air”—and think how it’s a damselfly, wings angled back and clasp’d upright, not the flat-wing’d aeroplane of a dragonfly I’m thinking of (yesterday) saying “green darner.” Thinking’s primary wayward fealty—and excitement—is to its sputtery aggregates of rhythm (see Joyce’s “irregular musketry of applause”) and memory (“jumping like nerves in fatigue”—the two register identically—rounds, bulletins, jump ’n’ jive). Here’s Gilfillan’s “Stone’s Throw”:

And noon: a horsedead in Manhattan, a big dun dressed to the nines just struck by a taxi,Central Park West, the bright yellow cabtossed up under a linden tree—

both just infrom thirty years ago:

Extend the tongue and take the conjugation.

The wolf whistle blown backwards means“Hey, over here!”

And sundownthe elegy-in-advance: for Lewis,Jerry Lee: Men without pianoshurry through the stations.

And typing that, thinking, “Is it the color yellow (canary, taxi) that aligns (conjugates) the two? Is it the sound-conjunct of cityscape “linden” and “tenement”?” Thinking: “How close memory lies! That one’s history’d assemble itself so judiciously into the classical lines (and intimacy) of a day.” Thinking: “How adroitly that phrase “Men without pianos” deposits the piano’d “Lewis, Jerry Lee” up amongst the gods!” There’s a fine mix of the jocular off-handed (“a big dun dressed / to the nines”) and the nigh-sacramental (“Extend the tongue”) in Gilfillan’s “stance”—and mimick’d by the lingo. (Recalls, a mite, Charles Wright, though Wright’s work’s apt to collapse into slightly finical God-talk.) There’s an easygoing sense of ritual—ancient impulse—in Gilfillan’s work:

Sage in September

Sprigs for sunrise,sprigs for Taos, and soldierson the steep blue sea.

The slopes of Taos,true south, building, firingto the aspen smoulder-golden—sage for the cello in its breeze.

Sprigs for small thingsrousted, on the run, Septembered.Flocks of longspurs slipping downthe continent by night. Sage for them,moving though the meshof the dangerous starlight.

Isn’t that Father Hopkins who’s summon’d by the “aspen smoulder-golden”? (Or, too, in “Sprigs for small things / rousted, on the run . . .” Lovely echoes of “Pied Beauty”: “Glory be to God for dappled things . . .”) Gilfillan, certes, turns against Hopkins’s father’d-forth end-assuredness: in lieu of a Maker (“Praise him” the poem ends) “whose beauty is past change,” one’s left with pure movement, slippage, unseen—the migratory longspurs “moving though the mesh / of the dangerous starlight.” The sempiternal tenuousness (“What does not change / is the will to change”) of the natural world and us, too, “on the run.” One pleasure in Gilfillan’s work: an audacious precision that half-mocks itself (see, in “Falling Folds,” a report of trying “to catch the pitch of osier”—a red-bark’d native dogwood—with “the Mongol vermilion overset / with Prismacolor plum”; see, in “For Lute and Trombone,” “Darwin’s deep-set monkey eyes / sad as sand”; see, in “Tulip Trees,” “Flocks / of starlings loafing in treetops / . . . like, somehow, / (something about that slack / expectant aggregate), a pack / of baboons around a savannah pond.”) Profuse and tangible particulars, human frailty and dignity—that “somehow,” the “personal” (that ineradicable and pervasive sense of a self: of a cheese, it says—“I like its indestructibility / as much as its taste, which is nil. It travels / well”), opposed to the sort of lately prevalent mystificatory hash, Gilfillan himself delineates thus (“Summer Letter”): “You know / the old schoolboy prank / of staring fixedly into the sky / to get passersby to do the same— / X’s poems often seem to work / like that.”

In the center of Gilfillan’s The Bark of the Dog: a series of five longish letter-poems, respondents undivulg’d, work I consider the strongest in the book. The letter-poem must skirt the danger O’Hara (in “A Letter to Bunny”) hazards: “When anyone reads this but you it begins / to be lost.” In exchange, it occasions a wholly malleable “field” tack’d down by sheer intimacy of voice. The absent addressee, the present voice, the fickle interrupts of a history presumably shared: pylons supporting “flow” along the poem’s “not continuous ‘length.’” Here’s one, uncomment’d (though note the “vague scape . . . intelligently used”—that measure of care of one’s materials central to Gilfillan’s work), to end with:

Letter to Farouk

You are in Croatia,Croazia, reasonsunclear. We have the stinkof ailanthus on the air, at leastin this corner of town.

I had a dream last weekso classical in its lines it was an honest pleasure just to lean back on the Jungian greenand watch it all go by:

Wandering in a lush, vague scape (rural, but intelligently used,vineyards and rolling tillage here and there, forest on the slopes above), reasonunclear. Then I spya pair of bulls emerging in the middle distance—they’ve seen me, start my way—bulls of fierce degree:wildly colored, striped,with enormous horns: mandrillsof bulls for a cloud-forest zoo.

On they came, picking up speed, seemed bent on real trouble. Then,in the flash of an eye, the End, I stand and stroke their noses, reaching across the fence I nimblyjumped. Everyone calm and cozy.

Have you been dreamingin Croatia? Once or twiceI saw an abstract New York City as consummate Tuscan hill town perched contentedly at the topof a long spiral path with pleasing neo-ploughboy Hudson views,

and once not long ago a flickerof my Uncle Dudley walking from a house in stolid concentration to snip a single yellow rose,then hurry back inside.

But who needs dreams? Catalpasare in blossom (from the Creek, not the Greek: “head with wings”).The other day I stood behind a woman with a snood, we were waiting to cross the street, and when she turned she had a perfectEaster Island face—I mean the moai stones—that broke in good Jungian style into a lovely Easter Island smile.

Now thatwill change the contents of your hat.

Audubon, alsoin mid-reverie, from oneof his Delineations:“Reader, I am very happy.”

And when do you get back?

Will you be wearing, even bearing,wild cravats?

(“Cravat”: out of the French cravate, applying the national name Cravate [Croat, Croatian] to the neck scarf. “In vogue in France in the 17th c. in imitation of the linen scarf worn round the neck by Croatian mercenaries.” Gilfillan’s care of materials extending unvaryingly, pointedly, to the etymological.)

* Out of the Joshua Hoeynck-edit’d booklet of Olson’s writings extending “Projective Verse,” The Principle of Measure in Composition by Field: Projective Verse II (Chax, 2010), containing the title essay along with a piece call’d “Notes on Poetics (toward Projective Verse II).” Hoeynck’s excellent notes point out how Olson’s next sentence—“A poem must do equal justice to atomism, to continuity, to causation, to memory, to perception, to quantitative as well as qualitative forms, and to extension (measurable existence in field)”—comes directly out of one of Alfred North Whitehead’s 1927 lectures collect’d in Process and Reality: “Olson only changes the word ‘cosmology’ to ‘a poem’ . . .”